The camera moves through the swamp. Sounds of calling
birds can be heard. Light creates apparitions and optical illusions as
it is filtered through the trees. We hear the voice of NAT TURNER:

NAT TURNER (VO)

1 heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly
appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid
down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take
it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching
when the first should be last and the last should be first.

Dissolve to a two-story house seen through the trees
in SouthamptonCounty.
A light can be seen flickering through a downstairs window. After a moment
light from a candle is extinguished and all is quiet except for the hooting
of owls in the forest nearby. The silhouette of a man is seen looking
at the house. When he leaves the frame, the following title is superimposed
over the house:

August 21, 1831 Southampton
County, Virginia

Inside, the house is completely dark except for faint
moonlight that reveals the outline of NAT TURNER slowly making his way
down the hallway, hatchet in his hand. He peeks into a room where JOSEPH
TRAVIS, and his wife, SALLY are sleeping. TURNER and WILL quickly enter
the bedroom. In the faint light, NAT TURNER takes aim and brings the blade
of his hatchet down upon the skull of the sleeping JOSEPH TRAVIS. The
blade glances off TRAVIS'S head and he leaps from his bed shouting for
his wife. WILL lunges forward and kills TRAVIS with one blow of his axe.
Blood splatters on SALLY and WILL kills her as well. TURNER and WILL leave
the bedroom and they emerge from the house carrying their blood stained
weapons, as we hear the voice of NAT TURNER:

NAT TURNER (VO)

The murder of this family, five in number, was the work
of a moment. There was a little infant sleeping in a cradle, that was
forgotten, until we had left the house and gone some distance, when Henry
and Will returned and killed it.

We see the sleeping baby in its cradle and then cut to
TURNER organizing the slaves into a military formation. All the slaves
hold a weapon or two - a musket, a pistol or an axe and farm implement.
TURNER leads them back to the woods.

NARRATOR (VO)

Over the next twenty-four hours, Nat Turner led a small
group of slaves from farm to farm, killing every white man, woman and
child they encountered. They gathered guns and more recruits during a
brief but bloody revolt that spread terror throughout the slave-holding
South.

Dissolve to close up images of legs and hands in chains,
words being written on paper and hands writing.

NARRATOR (VO)

Nat Turner was captured and hanged. In the days before
his execution, he agreed to tell his story. But after his death, his words
became the property of others, as his body was during his life.

Dissolve to shots from literary representations of Nat
Turner from William Wells Brown, Randolph Edmonds, William Styron and
Harriet Beecher Stowe.

NARRATOR (VO)

His story has been continually retold since 1831. He
has been depicted as a great and inspiring hero, and vilified as an insane
fanatic. Each author possesses Nat Turner, transforming his identity and
the meaning of his revolt.

Dissolve to silhouette of Nat Turner looking back at
the Travis farm, cut to wide shot as he departs and then dissolve to the
face of Nat Turner slowly emerging from the waters of Cabin Pond.

NARRATOR (VO)

Although today we cannot clearly make out the face of
the man, he continues to provoke a bitter debate over the violence that
he inspired. For a nation unable to come to terms with the legacy of slavery,
Nat Turner remains a troublesome property.

We superimpose the title and then fade to black.

NAT TURNER A TROUBLESOME PROPERTY

The screen is black. As the sounds of the hunters seem
to come closer, we see quick images of the white militia (10 in number),
searching the tangled terrain with their dogs for the slave rebels or
any black person. We crosscut between the two perspectives - the hunter
and the hunted - creating an impressionistic recreation of the massive
manhunt.

NARRATOR (VO)

Nat Turner's slave rebellion triggered a massive mobilization
of local militia and vigilante units in Virginia
and neighboring North Carolina. As many as 3,000 armed men
were called into action to fight what turned out to be 60 to 80 rebels.

ERIC FONER (VO)

The balance of sheer military power, was weighted tremendously
against the slaves in this country.

ERIC FONER (OC)

Slaves don't have the organization, the access to arms,
the military tradition to be able to mobilize a successful insurrection.

MARY KEMP DAVIS (OC)

Slavery itself was such an abomination that I could see
how it would drive men and women to do desperate things. A slave revolt
by its nature, to me is a pretty desperate act.

NARRATOR (VO)

Outraged by the sight of the victims of the revolt -
including many badly mutilated women and children, the militia and vigilante
units engaged in a slaughter of their own.

A small group of the militia emerges from the woods into
a clearing on the edge of a stream. They drag behind them a bleeding,
black man (FLEEING SLAVE - the face we saw earlier) and tie him to a tree.
One of the men takes aim with his musket and shoots the man to death.

ERIC FONER (VO)

The violent, brutal reaction is meant as a warning.

ERIC FONER (OC)

It is meant to frighten those who might be contemplating
acts like this in the future. It is meant to demonstrate the power of
white society.

The men begin to mutilate the dead man's body. Two militiamen
drag another CAPTURED SLAVE into the clearing. The captive is horrified
to see the other militiamen raise high a severed head of the dead slave.

NARRATOR (VO)

At least 50 and perhaps many more slaves and Free Blacks
were summarily executed in the days after the suppression of the rebellion.

PETER WOOD (VO)

There's no question that there's a cult of violence that
surrounds the tension between black and white during slavery times and
after.

PETER WOOD (OC)

It's hard for us to fathom cutting off peoples' heads
and putting them on poles, parading them around. Hanging bodies up in
chains. dismembering the body. Taking home souvenirs.

ERIC FONER (OC)

We know all about the victims, the white victims of Turner's
rebellion; who they were, where they were killed, what their names were,
what their families were. Nobody knows the names of even all the participants
in the Turner rebellion, and certainly all the innocent blacks who were
killed or imprisoned or beaten afterwards. This is not part of our official
historical memory. That piece of the story is just forgotten or suppressed
and probably can never really be completely recovered.

EKEWUEME MICHAEL THELWELL (OC)

If a lot of those black people were not the property
of white people, a lot more of them would be killed. Wasn't it Virginia
law that said, if you kill someone's slave, the state had to reimburse
them for the cost of the slave or something like that?

Inside a crowded rural courtroom in 1831, JEREMIAH COBB
and four other white JUSTICES preside over the trial of several black
men and one woman. The courtroom is crowded with townspeople (but not
as much as we will see later at the trial of Nat Turner). GUARDS, the
JAILER, the CLERK and the PROSECUTOR are present. The procedure seems
rushed. The judge calls a witness. The justices, JEREMIAH COBB and JAMES
TREZEVANT gavel their verdicts:

NARRATOR (VO)

Every rebel, except Nat Turner, was quickly killed or
captured. During the month of September and on into October, nearly 50
accused rebels stood trial in SouthamptonCounty.

JEREMIAH COBB AND JAMES TREZEVANT (FRAGMENTS)

Stand up….Guilty as charged…You shall be hanged by the
neck until you are dead…The prisoner is guilty…The Court doth value the
said slave to the sum of four hundred and twenty-five dollars…

NARRATOR (VO)

Ultimately, 19 were hanged while others were transported
and sold outside the boundaries of the state.

JEREMIAH COBB AND JAMES TRAZEVANT (FRAGMENTS)

The Court recommends to the Governor that the punishment
be commuted to transportation.

The sound of the judge's voice and the pounding of his
gavel echo through the woods and swamps around Cabin Pond.

The camera appears to be searching for someone.

NARRATOR (VO)

And still Nat Turner remained at large. On September
17, 1831, Virginia Governor John Floyd issued a proclamation offering
a $500 reward for the capture of Nat Turner.

As we hear the words of Governor Floyd (read by an actor),
image of the Governor's reward notice appears.

GOVERNOR JOHN FLOYD
Nat is between 30 and 35 years old, 5 feet 6 or 8 inches high, weighs
between 150 and 160 lbs., rather bright complexion, but not a mulatto,
broad-shouldered, large flat nose, large eyes, broad flat feet.

NARRATOR (VO)

Governor Floyd's description of Nat Turner is the closest
thing we have to a portrait of the man. But it is nothing more than a
wanted poster, created to help white men capture a fugitive.

The sounds of hunting dogs bay as the camera explores
possible hiding places in the woods around Cabin Pond - fallen trees,
thick underbrush, depressions in the terrain, and shallow caves.

NARRATOR (VO)

We do not know exactly what happened at the capture of
Nat Turner, but a nineteenth-century engraving offers one possible image
of the moment.

Dissolve to a nineteenth-century lithograph of the capture
of Nat Turner by Benjamin Phipps. Dissolve to BENJAMIN PHIPPS walking
with his dog in the woods near Cabin Pond.

We do know it was not until October 30th, 70 days after
the outbreak of the rebellion that Benjamin Phipps stumbled onto Nat Turner's
hiding place. The slave had never wandered further than a few miles from
his home farm.

NAT TURNER slowly emerges from under a covering of leaves
beneath a fallen log. We can not see his face. PHIPPS confronts TURNER
with a musket. TURNER surrenders his sword. PHIPPS leads TURNER away.

PHIPPS
Come on out of there…you come on out of there now… (As Turner appears
with his sword) Put it down, I said put it down.

NARRATOR (VO)

The next morning he was taken to the SouthamptonCounty jail in Jerusalem
to await trial.

Dissolve to the interior of the jail (Gray's Jail cell).
A thirty-year old attorney, THOMAS R. GRAY, his clothes clean but frayed,
speaks to the JAILER. Through the open cell door, we see the barely visible
features of NAT TURNER covered in chains in the small jail cell.

NARRATOR (VO)

It was there in a jail cell that Nat Turner first encountered
a local lawyer, Thomas R. Gray. Over the next three days, Gray interviewed
Turner and then published his version of Turner's story, which later became
the main source for all future interpretations of the man.

Gray turns and addresses the camera.

THOMAS R. GRAY
The late insurrection in Southampton
has greatly excited the public mind and led to a thousand idle, exaggerated
and mischievous reports. Every thing connected with the sad affair was
wrapped in mystery, until Nat Turner, the leader of this ferocious band,
whose name resounded throughout our widely extended empire, was captured.
Since his confinement, by permission of the jailer, I have had ready access
to him, and determined for the gratification of public curiosity to commit
his statements to writing and publish them with little or no variation
from his own words.

THOMAS PARRAMORE (OC)

Nobody can, I think, say precisely why Thomas R. Gray
went into the jail cell on November the first, 1831. It could be that
he just wanted the public to know. He felt the public had a right to know
what Nat Turner had done from Nat Turner's own point of view. It could
be that he sought prestige after a great drop in his own reputability
by going in and making himself as famous as he could by being Nat Turner's
amanuensis, taking down what he said. He could've been thinking of the
income he might derive.

Dissolve to a small wooden jail cell. Except for diffused
rays of sunlight entering the room from a small window, a candle on the
floor is the principal source of light. NAT TURNER is shackled from head
to foot. A short chain allows him very limited movement. He sits on a
straw bed on the floor. THOMAS R. GRAY sits on a stool opposite him, discreetly
taking notes in the candlelight. When TURNER speaks, he mostly speaks
to GRAY. When GRAY speaks to TURNER we see GRAY from an angle that is
TURNER'S point of view. This will be the setting throughout the reenactment
of The Confessions of Nat Turner.

NAT TURNER (OC)

You have asked me to give you a history of the motives,
which induced me to undertake the late insurrection, as you call it. To
do so, I must go back to the days of my infancy, and even before I was
born. I was thirty-one years of age on the 2nd of October last, born the
property of Benjamin Turner, of this county.

NAT TURNER (OC)

Being at play with other children, when three or four
years old, I was telling them something, which my mother overhearing,
said it had happened before I was born. I stuck to my story, however,
and related some things, which went in her opinion to confirm it. Others
being called on were greatly astonished, knowing that these things had
happened, and caused them to say in my hearing, I surely would be a prophet,
as the Lord had shewn me things that had happened before my birth.

NARRATOR (VO)

Many historians are not convinced that all or even most
of the words Gray attributes to Turner were actually spoken by him.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. (OC)

There is no Nat Turner back there, whole, to be retrieved.
You would have to go and create Nat Turner. We have a very fragmented,
disjointed narrative, which purports to be the confessions, and there
is the question of whose voice is there.

MARY KEMP DAVIS (OC)

I do not believe, for a moment, that Nat Turner talked
that way.

VINCENT HARDING (OC)

It is very clear by now that we cannot take Nat Turner's
confessions at face value, but it is also very clear that we cannot cast
it aside.

Cut to Turner in his cell as Gray writes down his words.

NARRATOR (VO)

Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner creates a definite image
of the man, but we can never be sure the face we see is that of Nat Turner.

NAT TURNER (OC)

I was praying one day at my plough, the spirit spoke
to me, saying: "Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven and all things shall be added unto
you."

THOMAS R. GRAY (OC)

What do you mean by the Spirit?

NAT TURNER (OC)

The Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days.

VINCENT HARDING (OC)

Nat Turner must have eaten up the Christian and Hebrew
scriptures and must have begun to feel and see and sense himself as the
embodiment of these.

As Turner begins to describe his visions, he turns from
Gray and addresses the viewer, assuming more and more the role of a preacher.

NAT TURNER (OC)

The thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in
streams and I heard a voice saying, "Such is your luck, such you
are called, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bare it."
While laboring in the field, I discovered drops of blood on the corn as
though it were dew from heaven and I communicated it to many, both white
and black in the neighborhood. And I then found on the leaves in the woods
hieroglyphic characters and numbers with the forms of men in different
attitudes portrayed in blood, and representing figures I had seen before
in the heavens.

NAT TURNER (OC)

And on the 12th of May 1828, 1 heard a loud noise in
the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent
was loosened, and that Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for
the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent,
for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the
last should be first.

THOMAS R. GRAY (OC)

Do you not find yourself mistaken now?

NAT TURNER (OC)

Was not Christ crucified?

HERBERT APTHEKER (OC)

Was not Christ crucified? That's an astonishing statement
by a man who's chained to a wall and going to be hanged the next day,
and he's told that all your comrades are hanged. That your wife has been
sold south and that you will be hanged tomorrow. And he stands up from
the cot and he says, "Was not Christ crucified?" Can you imagine
that? It's one of the great moments in human history, isn't it?

WILLIAM STYRON (OC)

Any intelligent reader coming upon the confessions, the
original confessions of Nat Turner and then reflects on those confessions
for a while, would have to say to himself "This guy is a crazy lunatic."
There's something really strange the moment when he says to Mr. Gray,
"Was not Christ not crucified?"

PETER WOOD (OC)

The myths contradict each other and they grow up, "He's
a saint," "He's a crazy man." You get conflicting reports.
People repeat them. They get carried on, and the historian has to peel
back through that onion and try to find the real historical person.

NAT TURNER (OC)

And until the first sign appeared, I should conceal it
from the knowledge of men. And on the appearance of the sign….

THOMAS R. GRAY (HE SPEAKS TO THE CAMERA.)

The eclipse of the sun last February

NAT TURNER (OC)

I should arise and prepare myself and slay my enemies
with their own weapons. And until we had armed and equipped ourselves
and gathered sufficient force, neither age nor sex was to be spared,

THOMAS R. GRAY (HE SPEAKS TO THE CAMERA.)

Which was invariably adhered to.

KITTY FUTRELL (OC)

When people bring that argument to me that in war you
kill people in war. But that's declared. You give people the chance to
know that I'm going to fight you or that I might kill you. These people
were not given that opportunity.

EUGENE GENOVESE (OC)

Revolutions have to be thorough. You spare the kids -
they run off and warn your enemies. If you're going to take that road,
you'd better make up your mind to take it to the end. That is the horror
of the thing. It's all well and good to say that these killings came out
of rage. I don't doubt that to a certain extent they did, but the real
horror is that even if they hadn't, matters would have probably taken
the same course. A revolution is either thorough or it's doomed. Real
revolutionaries know that, which is why they have to proceed in cold blood.

NAT TURNER (OC)

The murder of this family, five in number, was the work
of a moment. There was a little infant sleeping in a cradle, that was
forgotten, until we had left the house and gone some distance, when Henry
and Will returned and killed it.

RICK FRANCIS (OC)

The killing of the women and children sticks in my craw
more than anything else. He would certainly be remembered better by history
if he had limited the killing to adult males or just white adults.

BRUCE TURNER (OC)

The evil that he saw was what was needed to be destroyed
and the only way to force the destruction of that evil was to make the
price so high, that those who was practicing slavery would eventually
sue for peace and says we cannot keep slavery because it will cost us
too much.

KITTY FUTRELL (OC)

The only thing I'll say is that slavery was so wrong,
but murder is wrong, too.

NAT TURNER (OC)

We started for Mrs. Reese's. Where finding the door unlocked,
we entered and murdered Mrs. Reese in her bed, while sleeping. Her son
awoke, but he had only time to say who is that and he was no more.

MARTHA MINOW (OC)

I think that for many people, many white people, they
identify with the innocence. They identify with innocent children. It's
a position that's much more comfortable than identifying with slaveholders.
And because that's a feature of the story, it makes it seems safe for
people who know that they have to stand morally against slavery to say,
nonetheless, that there was something morally wrong in the uprising.

RAY WINBUSH (OC)

I don't think his goal was to kill white children. His
goal was to get freedom for his people, way before Malcolm even said,
"by any means necessary." If that meant the killing of white
children, so be it. It was an uncompromising position, and I think it
was based on something that he had seen around him - the killing of black
children, the selling of black children. It was reprehensible, but I understand
why he did it.

As GRAY speaks to us, TURNER struggles with his chains
and slowly lifts himself from the stool and with great difficulty hobbles
to the window. He stares out at the moon, which is a sickly green color.

THOMAS R. GRAY (OC)

The calm, deliberate composure with which he spoke of
his late deeds and intentions, the expression of his fiend-like face when
excited by enthusiasm, still bearing the stains of the blood of helpless
innocence about him; clothed with rags and wraped in chains; yet daring
to raise his manacled hands to heaven, with a spirit soaring above the
attributes of man; I looked on him and my blood curdled in my veins. He
is a complete fanatic, or plays his part most admirably.

MARY KEMP DAVIS (OC)

I was struck with the tug that Nat Turner had over him.
So I remember thinking, even as he was trying to present him as this figure,
this misguided fanatic, as he called him, he was still fascinated with
him, impressed by him, in some way.

Dissolve to the jail cell. As GRAY leaves TURNER alone
in his cell, the camera slowly moves to frame his silhouetted image against
the moonlit window.

NARRATOR (VO)

Over and over again, those who search for the meaning
of Nat Turner begin their inquiry with a search for the meaning of The
Confessions.

VINCENT HARDING (OC)

And I see Turner's confessions as, our confessions of
not really being quite sure who we are in relationship to each other,
black and white in this country.

The EXECUTIONER places a noose around TURNER'S neck.
The cart is moved away. He dies by slow strangulation. Dissolve to a long
shot of the crowd of bystanders surrounding the silhouette of a body hanging
from the tree.

NARRATOR (VO)

We know very little about the hanging of Nat Turner.
The only contemporary account appeared in a local newspaper. And, as with
all Nat Turner stories, we are left with more questions than facts.

PETER WOOD (OC)

The record about Nat Turner is so ambiguous. We have
so few facts, and yet he's at the center of such an enormous controversy
that there's room for lots of different interpretations.

Dissolve to illustrations of scenes from Uncle Tom's
Cabin. Dissolve to a photograph of Harriet Beecher Stowe and then to the
cover of Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp,
concluding with illustrations from the novel.

NARRATOR (VO)

In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe created a national debate
on the morality of slavery with her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. When she
published Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp
in 1856, with the title character closely based on the historical Nat
Turner, she confronted the question of ending slavery by violent means.
But she could not embrace an uncompromising black man who was devoted
to the death of all white people. And so she softened him considerably.

The camera discovers a different actor playing NAT TURNER
as he is described by the voice of HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (read by an actor).

THE VOICE OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

He was a tall black man of magnificent stature and proportions.
He wore a fantastic turban. There were elements in him, which might, under
other circumstances, have made him a poet. There was in him a vein of
that gentleness, which softens the heart towards children and the inferior
animals. But there also burned in him, like tongues of flame in a black
pool of naptha, a subtle and restless fire.

NAT TURNER is feeding a squirrel, when the approaching
sounds of men in search of him force him to slip into the swamp water
and make his way further into the tangled woods.

WILLIAM STYRON (VO)

Everyone possesses Nat Turner because he fits into the
role each creator wants to make him fit into. The amazing thing about
Nat Turner is the fact that so little is known about him.

WILLIAM STYRON (OC)

We have those confessions and virtually nothing else.
There are almost no accounts of what he was like, seen through the eyes
of anyone else, black or white. So this is, as I say, an astounding boon
and a gift, to anyone who wanted to use him as a metaphor, symbol for
anything having to do with slavery, having to do with freedom, having
to do with rebellion. He fits no mold and fits every mold, all at once;
and that's what has made him so intriguing to so many people over the
years.

Photos and/or lithos of Frederick Douglass.

NARRATOR (VO)

In the years leading up to the Civil War, Frederick Douglass
and other black abolitionists repeatedly voiced admiration for Nat Turner
and other slave rebels.

ERIC FONER (OC)

What Douglass said was that the Nat Turner's were actually
more legitimately the heirs of the American Revolution than the whites
who celebrated July 4th every year in the 1840's and '50's but owned slaves
and deprived millions of Americans of their freedom.

The camera slowly moves into a close-up of a photo of
William Wells Brown from the 1860s.

NARRATOR (VO)

Continuing in the tradition of Frederick Douglass, William
Wells Brown, an abolitionist leader who had escaped from slavery, invoked
a heroic image of Nat Turner in an essay written during the Civil War.
In the midst of this essay, he imaginatively constructed the speech Turner
might have delivered to his fellow conspirators at Cabin Pond.

The camera explores the nineteenth-century engraving,
Nat Turner Talking with His Confederates. Nat Turner is seen pointing
off into the woods as four of his followers intensely stare at his determined
face, illuminated by a campfire. Dissolve from this image to a scene that
almost perfectly matches it in the woods we have seen earlier in the film.
A different actor from those who we have seen before portrays NAT TURNER
as he speaks.

NAT TURNER

Friends and brothers! We are to commence a great work
tonight. Our race is to be delivered from slavery, and God has appointed
us as the men to do his bidding; and let us be worthy of our calling.

OSSIE DAVIS (VO/OC)

We gloried in these heroes, as children will. Sometimes
we would create among ourselves, we boys, in particular, our own version
of what Nat did and what we would've done if we had been old Nat and how
that would've satisfied us greatly.

NARRATOR (VO)

While some African Americans invoked Nat Turner's name
as a great black hero and liberator, most Southern whites continued to
portray him as a fanatic and villain who attacked an essentially benevolent
institution. This became the dominant white view throughout the nation
during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Archival film footage of scenes in the rural areas of
Virginia
during the New Deal is intercut with scenes from WPA projects in the South.
Film footage and photographs feature former slaves and the WPA workers
who interviewed them.

NARRATOR (VO)

Black folk memories of the rebellion surfaced in the
WPA interviews of ex-slaves conducted during the 1930s. The WPA undertook
the task of finding and questioning black residents of the South who had
once been slaves.

Sometimes the interviews produced memories that were
obviously passed on by family members who lived at the time of Nat Turner's
Revolt. Sometimes these recollections explored the violence in Turner's
insurrection.

Dissolve from the photomontage to ALLEN CRAWFORD sitting
on a porch talking to a white female WPA WORKER who writes down his words.

NARRATOR (VO)

In 1937, the ex-slave, Allen Crawford, spoke about Nat
Turner from stories he had heard growing up in SouthamptonCounty.

ALLEN CRAWFORD

Fust place he got to was his mistress's house. Said God
'dained him to start the fust war with forty men. Well when he got to
his mistress house he commence to grab his missus baby an' slung it back
an' fo'th three times. Said it was so hard for him to kill dis baby' cause
it had been so playful settin' on his lap. An' dat chile sho' did love
him. So third sling he went quick 'bout it, killin' dat baby.

Dissolve into film footage from the 1930s that depicts
a nation struggling with economic depression, labor unrest and racial
segregation.

NARRATOR (VO)

The 1930s were a turbulent time in America.
It was an era of segregation, when the seeds of change were beginning
to be sown. During this time of racial strife, artists, writers and playwrights
were inspired to tell the story of Nat Turner and his revolt, exploring
the consequences of using of violence to end oppression in his time -
and their own.

Slow zoom into a photograph of Randolph Edmonds, that
dissolves into photographs or archival film footage of black theatre companies
in the 1930s.

NARRATOR (VO)

In 1935, black theatre educator Randolph Edmonds presented
the Nat Turner story as a play written to be performed at schools and
colleges. In the climactic scene, Edmonds turns his attention
to the horrible consequences of the rebellion for the men and women of
the slave community.

A different actor portrays NAT TURNER. The scene is obviously
set on a theatre stage but it closely resembles the scenes we have seen
earlier in the film, set in and around Cabin Pond. NAT TURNER stands over
JESSE, one of his rebel followers, who lies wounded at his feet. We hear
dialogue from the scene as we see LUCINDA waiting in the wings ready for
her entrance. She is a young slave girl dressed in dark clothes.

A beast! She called me a beast! Ef Ah's a beast, who
made me one? Ef dey buy and sell me, whip me lak dawgs, and feed me dere
leavin's, how can Ah be nothin' else but a beast? (Looking down on Jessee)
Jessee's daid. Hark is captured, and dere ain't no army. Whut is Ah gwine
tuh do now? Lawd? What is Ah gwine tuh do? (The yellow light of the moon
filters down through the trees.) Look at dat moon comin' back tuh light
up de worl'. Hit is big and round and yellow. Hit done dripped out all
hit's blood. Ma hands is full o' blood, too. Will dey ever be clean? Was
Ah wrong, Lawd, tuh fight dat black men mout be free? Show me a vision,
Lawd, lak yuh did when de sperits was fightin' in de air. Talk tuh me,
Holy Ghost. (He stops suddenly.) Hit mus be de soldiers lookin' 'bout
in de woods fuh me. Ah can't let dem catch me. Ah is gut tuh git me a
army and fight some mo' fuh freedom. Ah I wants to be free! Ah mus' hab
freedom fuh all de black slaves. Show me how tuh git hit, Lawd! (Shouting
wildly as he goes out.) Sperit ob Gawd! Show me de way! Guide me! Lead
me! Lead me!

He rushes off the stage. Everything is quiet. The yellow
rays of the moonlight filter down through the trees, creating apparitions
and faint images of ghost-like faces.

NARRATOR (VO)

There certainly was a real Nat Turner who lived and died
in Southampton County,
Virginia in 1831. But the
man who lived and died in numerous artistic portrayals since 1831 was
re-created over and over again to fit the needs of each of his creators.

Fade to black

Dissolve to a montage of scenes from Civil Rights activity
during the 1950s - the Montgomery Bus Boycott, lunchroom sit-ins, and
peaceful efforts to end school desegregation. Dissolve to images of violent
attacks against protesters engaged in acts of passive resistance - attacks
by police dogs, assaults at lunch counters, KKK marches, and the violent
break-up of peaceful marches.

NARRATOR (VO)

The decade of the 1950s was a watershed in our nation's
troubled history of race relations. During these years, the Civil Rights
movement began a full- scale assault on the elaborate system of racial
segregation in the South. The public was exposed repeatedly to images
of violence during these years. It was in this atmosphere that a growing
number of frustrated African Americans sought inspiration from Nat Turner
and the 1831 Southampton Slave Revolt.

RAY WINBUSH (OC)

I had never heard of Nat and I wanted to know more about
him. And I started just reading about him and what happened in SouthamptonCounty.

DR. ALVIN POUSSAINT (OC)

There was a debate going on among the young people in
different civil rights organizations about black consciousness vs. integration
and what direction they should move in order to keep the movement going
and keep liberating black folks.

Dissolve to a montage of images of revolutionary heroes
from the 1960s, black and white culminating in an idealized image of Nat
Turner speaking to his followers.

AYUKO BABU (VO)

Nat symbolized revolt, symbolized resistance. It was
a Black man refusing to accept his condition.

AYUKO BABU (OC)

So we identified with that brother, and we saw him as
a brother, we saw a direct link. We knew exactly what he felt like, because
we felt the same way. And we saw ourselves as continuing that struggle.

Dissolve to images and sounds/speeches of Black Panthers
in training exercises, marching in the streets of Oakland,
dissolving to scenes of Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown and Eldridge Cleaver
speaking at demonstrations.

Dissolve to an image from a nineteenth-century engraving
of Nat Turner, then dissolve to the orange and black dust jacket cover
of the 1967 edition of William Styron's novel, The Confessions of Nat
Turner.

NARRATOR (VO)

Nat Turner returned to the center of the national stage
with the publication in 1967 of William Styron's The Confessions of Nat
Turner. The novel was an instant bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize.

Montage of images from the 1950s, including a scene from
"Father Knows Best."

PETER WOOD (OC)

It is hard to reconstruct the bland, ill-informed atmosphere
of suburban, white America
in the 50s and 60s. It came as a revelation to, really, almost a whole
generation that they should even be thinking about these things.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. (OC)

It was through the Book-of-the-Month Club that I got
this novel called The Confessions of Nat Turner. I remember when it arrived,
and I started reading it that evening after I got home from school and
I stayed up all night and read it in one sitting.

WILLIAM STYRON (OC/VO)

My intention had been, from the very beginning, to present
a multifaceted complex overview of slavery as an institution, which totally
degraded a race of people. And that included such torment upon one of
its more gifted sons, namely Nat Turner, that it indeed turned him into
a half-crazed avenger. My book turned him into a far more heroic figure
than the actual Nat Turner was because I gave him human dimensions.

Image of actor playing NAT TURNER

OSSIE DAVIS (OC)

He didn't humanize Nat Turner for me because I came to
the novel with my own version of Nat Turner firmly established in my head.
So to whom did he humanize, to the white community? That might be possible
since the white community has always tended to look upon our rebels as
demons and as subhumans, as people who are attacking the bastions of white
civilization.

JAMES BALDWIN (OC)

When I was growing up, I was taught in American history
books that Africa had no history and
neither did I. That I was a savage about whom the less said the better,
who had been saved by Europe and brought to America. And of course I believed
it. I didn't have much choice. Those were the only books there were. I
am one of the people who built the country.

Images of James Baldwin and William Styron.

WILLIAM STYRON (VO)

Jimmy Baldwin moved into my house here in Connecticut
in the winter of 1960.

Archival film footage shows Baldwin
at the height of his celebrity in the 1960s.

WILLIAM STYRON (OC)

By this time, I was boiling to write the book, and I
think it was he who encouraged me more than anyone else to seize the idea
of the first person and to plunge into that kind of narrative mode. Because
he himself had already begun to deal with the idea of writing about white
people from an intimate point of view.

WILLIAM STYRON (OC)

He said, "What you should do, as a white writer,
is to be bold and take on the persona of a black man, Nat Turner."

Image of the cover of Gray's The Confessions of Nat Turner.

NARRATOR (VO)

William Styron gave his 20th Century novel the same title
as Thomas R. Gray's 1831 confessions. Examining this document for clues
about Nat Turner, Styron was fascinated by a particular passage.

NAT TURNER (OC)

Miss Margaret, when I discovered her, had concealed herself
in the corner, formed by the projection of cellar cap from the house.
On my approach she fled, but was quickly overtaken, and after repeated
blows with a sword, I killed her by a blow on the head with a fence rail.

Dissolve to a montage of photographs published in Life
Magazine prior to the publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner that
recreates William Styron's visit to Southampton in 1961.

THOMAS PARRAMORE (VO/OC)

Margaret was the only person killed by Nat Turner in
the course of the rebellion. She was a young white woman. Styron takes
this and makes a love affair out of it, between Nat and Margaret. I think
that African-Americans generally, and whites to some extent, resented
the relationship that Styron created.

WILLIAM STYRON (OC)

This was for a novelist the perfect sort of question
to ask. "Why? Why did he do this?" Also, in addition, wasn't
there some relationship between the two of them? Now we don't know anything
about their relationship, but I was writing a novel, I wasn't writing
a work of historiography, and I had a right to make a relationship between
Nat and Margaret Whitehead a kind of centerpiece of the book.

Dissolve to a scene from The Confessions of Nat Turner.
As NAT TURNER and MARGARET WHITEHEAD make their way through a grove of
trees, we hear the inner voice of

NAT TURNER (VO)

The closeness, the stillness, the seclusion here created
once more a voluptuous stirring in my blood. Her eyes met mine unflinchingly,
not so much coquettish as insistent - inviting, daring, almost expecting
my gaze to repose in her own eyes while she prattled blissfully on. It
was the longest encounter I could remember ever having with a white person's
eyes. I turned away, swept with lust again, hating her guts, now driven
close to distraction by that chattering monologue pitched at a girlish
whisper, which I no longer bothered to listen to or understand.

NARRATOR (VO)

Styron's attempt to imagine a relationship between Nat
Turner and the teenaged Margaret Whitehead provoked a storm of protest
from black critics.

OSSIE DAVIS (OC)

Nat Turner is one of our great heroes and we wanted him
to be presented to our children in a way that preserved and protected
our needs and our necessities. We need to say to our young girls, "You're
beautiful. You're hair is nappy. Of course, your skin is black. But you're
beautiful. And you're loveable and worthy of the respect of our young
men." But how could we say that if our great hero, instead of affirming
the beauty of black womanhood, went and affirmed the beauty of white womanhood.

LOUISE MERIWETHER (OC)

When I got the information from the Book-of-the-Month
Club, just reading about the book made me so angry that I tore up the
newsletter, flushed it down the toilet, and wrote a letter resigning from
the Book-of-the-Month Club in protest against them picking this book.

LOYLE HAIRSTON (OC)

It got tremendous reviews. All the critics loved it.
This tells me a great deal about attitudes. They themselves have never
come to grips with slavery, what it was about.

Dissolve to scenes from The Confessions of Nat Turner.

NARRATOR (VO)

But not all reviewers lavished praise on the novel. A
group known as "The Ten Black Writers" published a volume deeply
critical of Styron's image of the slave rebel.

Dissolve to montage of photos and articles of the Ten
Black Writers. As we hear his voice, we see close-ups of his article dissolving
to the author reading from his essay.

EKEWUEME MICHAEL THELWELL (VO/OC)

It is a book that made me particularly indignant because
it was so disappointing, because finally Nat Turner is going to get presented
on the main stage of American culture, instead of which, we get this travesty.

Dissolve to the beginning of a scene dramatized from
William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner.

VOICE OF NAT TURNER

I recall one of my former owners, Mr. Thomas Moore, once
saying that Negroes never committed suicide. I recollect the exact situation
- hog-killing time and Moore's puckered, pockmarked
face as he labored at the bloody carcass, and the exact words spoken to
two neighbors as I stood by listening.

THOMAS MOORE

Ever hear of a nigger killin' hisself? No, I figger a
darky he might want to kill hisself but he gets to thinkin' about it,
and he keeps thinkin' about it, thinkin' and thinkin', and pretty soon
he's gone to sleep. Right, Nat?

NAT TURNER

Yes sir, Marse Tom, that's right, sure enough.

VOICE OF NAT TURNER (NAT TURNER SITS IN THE JAIL CELL)

I had to admit to myself that I had never known of a
Negro who had killed himself and in trying to explain this fact I tended
to believe that in the face of such adversity it must be a Negro's Christian
faith, which swerved him away from the idea of self-destruction. But now
as I sit here amid the incessant murmur and buzz of the flies, I can no
longer say that I feel this to be true. It seemed rather that my black
shit-eating people were surely like flies, God's mindless outcasts, lacking
even that will to destroy by their own hand their unending anguish.

EKEWUEME MICHAEL THELWELL (VO)

How would anybody seeking to organize his people to struggle
for their own liberation have that perception of them?

EKEWUEME MICHAEL THELWELL (OC)

It was an act of arrogance, coming out of a profound
ignorance that led him to think he could restructure that experience in
anything that would be a credible way, or a way that reflected anything
that an informed black person would know of our own experience, to make
it acceptable to black people.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. (OC)

Novels can be good, novels can be bad, but I think it
is different to say that than to say, "You shouldn't have written
this in the first place because you are white" or "What are
you doing to our history by creating this character about whom we feel
deeply ambivalent?" Believe me, I think it was the sexuality of Nat
Turner that bugged people the most no matter how they justified it. I
think that without that the novel would have passed through without a
peep.

NAT TURNER bends down to move a branch from their path
and as he rises, his arm brushes against MARGARET WHITEHEAD'S breast.
She reacts with mild surprise and they continue walking, chattering on
as before.

NAT TURNER (VO)

The place where her breast had met my arm was like an
incandescence, tingling; again I was smothered by remorseless desire.
Insanely, I found myself measuring the risk. (His voice becomes insistent.)
Take her. Take her here on this bank by this quiet brook. Forget your
great mission. Abandon all for these hours of terror and bliss….

EUGENE GENOVESE (OC)

Being attracted to and repelled by members of the opposite
sex strikes me as the most natural thing in the world. And to have left
that out, to have rendered Turner incapable of that kind of internal struggle,
would have reduced his humanity. I think Styron knew exactly what he was
doing, and I think he did the right thing.

LOYLE HAIRSTON (OC)

We have to deal, as black people, with so much of this
kind of stuff, not so much in writing, but in our everyday lives.

RAY WINBUSH (VO)

What Styron had done was play at the worst fears of White
America and I think, frankly, fantasizing in his own mind as a white male
about the lustful feelings that black men had for white women.

Excerpt from "Birth of Nation."

RAY WINBUSH (OC)

I didn't want a white woman, and I didn't know of any
of my brothers who did. He said that Nat wanted one, and not only did
he want one, but he was willing to kill for it. And not only that, but
that was his primary motivation. Liberation was irrelevant. It was sexual,
unbridled sexual lust or something like that.

WILLIAM STYRON (OC)

What really would have caused rage on the part of the
Black community, I think, is if they had had a consummated sexual relationship,
which would really have proved my own racism. But actually, the relationship
between Nat Turner and Margaret Whitehead was infinitely more complicated,
it's as much filled with rage and hatred on Nat's part than any kind of
unrequited love.

Dissolve to a scene from The Confessions of Nat Turner.
We see MARGARET WHITEHEAD fleeing from NAT TURNER into a hayfield. NAT
TURNER catches up with MARGARET WHITEHEAD as she attempts to climb over
a pole fence. One of the poles gives way under foot. She trips forward,
bare arms outstretched. NAT TURNER thrusts his sword into her side, just
below her breast. She crumbles to the ground, limp. NAT TURNER stabs her
again in the same place. Blood stains her blue taffeta dress. NAT TURNER
lurches away from the stricken girl, but stops when he hears a faint cry.

MARGARET WHITEHEAD
Nat. Please kill me.

NAT TURNER turns and stares in the girl's direction.

MARGARET WHITHEAD
Please kill me.

NAT TURNER drops his sword and returns to the body of
MARGARET WHITEHEAD. Her head is cradled against the inside of her arm,
as if she has composed herself for sleep. NAT TURNER reaches down and
picks up a fence rail. He raises it above her head.

NAT TURNER (SOFTLY)

Shut your eyes.

MARGARET WHITEHEAD gazes up at NAT TURNER with a look
of drowsy tenderness and then closes her eyes.

MARGARET WHITHEAD (WHISPERS)

I hurt so.

NAT TURNER brings the fence rail down on her head, killing
her. He hurls the shattered rail far into the field. The camera slowly
pulls away as NAT TURNER slowly circles the lifeless body, and we hear
the voice of William Styron.

WILLIAM STYRON (VO/OC)

He does at the end realize the horror of having killed
this woman, out of his rage. I think that Nat Turner's feeling of love
at the end is really an attempt to express his own sense of reconciliation
and redemption and has very little to do with any direct human connection.
I think this is an abstraction. At least that was what I was attempting
to do.

Montage of images reveal the fury of student demonstrations
on universities and colleges demanding the end of the war in Vietnam,
opposing the draft and demanding the creation of Black Studies programs.

As we hear from Styron, we continue the montage of demonstrations
increasing tension, as we intercut images form the assassinations of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, culminating in full scale riots in
major cities across the country.

WILLIAM STYRON (VO/OC)

It always struck me as a great irony that I began to
write Nat Turner the summer of Martin Luther King's great speech in Washington,
and it was a time of reconciliation, of non-violence and peacefulness,
a sense that blacks and whites could work this thing out together. But
by the time I finished the novel in 1967, this sweetness and light that
Martin Luther King was predicting had turned into a kind of hellish nightmare
on the racial scene, and so Nat Turner appeared, my Nat Turner appeared
at a time when this dream of Martin Luther King's had evaporated. So,
there was a good reason why my book was met with such a mixed reaction.

Dissolve to a montage of images from the debate over
the novel in the media.

PETER WOOD (OC)

I do think that in an extraordinary and strange way,
Bill Styron did do a service in a sense of putting Nat Turner back on
the table. Making people argue about who he was and nobody, no matter
which side they took of the argument, really knew very much. It was like
people throwing punches in the dark. And in the last generation since
then, we've learned a lot more, though we still have not penetrated the
veil entirely.

EKEWUEME MICHAEL THELWELL (OC)

We can't be depending on white people to represent our
culture with integrity and imagination and respect.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. (OC)

I think that if you don't like Bill Styron's Nat Turner,
write your own. I think the only way that you can fight a representation
in art that you don't like is to create new art, create more art, surround
it.

James McGee is putting the finishing touches on a very
large painting depicting Nat Turner and his rebel army.

JAMES MCGEE (VO)

I don't consider myself an artist. I don't consider myself
as someone who can crtique art. I only paint for one reason and one reason
only, and that is to illustrate what is said to me through my ancestors.
They're not asking for revenge. They're asking to be recognized. I believe
that they will not rest unless their story is told, unless their voices
are heard.

Dissolve from James McGee's painting depicting Nat Turner
and his rebel army to a reprise of the attack on the Travis family.

NARRATOR (VO)

But can any work of art move Americans closer to an agreement
on the meaning of Nat Turner and his revolt?

At the sound of "Cut," we show the director
and crew working on this scene and others throughout the ending of the
film.

CHARLES BURNETT (VO)

I think there is a need for closure. There is a need
to resolve this thing. Sometimes it takes a mediator. A piece of artwork
can do that.

CHARLES BURNETT (OC)

The whole idea is "Who is Nat Turner?" We don't
know. And people with little information have created their own Nat, they
have claimed him. It is not that we are trying to reclaim Nat. We are
just trying to present other artist's interpretations of Nat Turner, and
trying to do that very faithfully without interpreting their work.

Charles Burnett is seen directing actors in scenes from
earlier in the film.

KENNETH GREENBERG (OC)

Everywhere in the film there is interpretation and the
subject matter we are dealing with is interpretation. Now, when you do
a film about interpretation, what's the film about that interpretation?
Isn't that film another interpretation? Every interpretation ultimately
forces you back into another interpretation, another interpretation, another
interpretation.

Charles Burnett directs a scene from Styron's novel.

CHARLES BURNETT (OC/VO)

That's the tension here, is to say, "No, you are
not doing your movie about Nat Turner." What you are doing, you are
doing William Styron's interpretation of Nat Turner as faithful as possible
to William Styron's scenes in his novel. Same thing with Thomas R. Gray,
you are trying to be matter-of-fact about Thomas R. Gray. You are not
trying to take any kind of license.

CHARLES BURNETT (VO)

We can't say in this film that this person is wrong or
that person is wrong. It is not about that. The truth is this event happened.
People interpreted it a certain way on racial lines and the only way to
resolve it, or to live it is to have some kind of dialogue and come to
terms with what was this event.

We see the scene of Nat Turner killing Margaret from
Styron's novel from the film crew's POV.

MARTHA MINOW (VO/OC)

I think there is a danger of sliding into a kind of relativism.
There are multiple versions of history, and let's just line them all up.
And I think that the great challenge would be how to devise a structure
that permits some degree of interpretation and reflection on multiple
perspectives without implying there was no truth of the matter.

Dissolve to an image of Nat Turner superimposed Gray's
Confessions.

EKEWUEME MICHAEL THELWELL (OC)

The fact is there was a historical Nat Turner. The fact
is that certain things were known about him. The fact is that as a consequence
of his actions, he occupied a very prominent and important role in the
collective memory and imagination of the black community and, perhaps,
possibly in the white community too.

Dissolve to a montage of Nat Turner who face is not clearly
seen.

WILLIAM STYRON (OC)
I think that the mysteriousness of the man, the absolute mysteriousness
of the man, will perpetually provoke people's imagination. He represents
an incredible need and hunger, just the fact that he did what he did,
right or wrong, or whatever the moral implications of what he did; he
did it.

Dissolve to Nat Turner and Hark entering the Travis bedroom
and raising the hatchet.

VINCENT HARDING (OC)

And it seems to me that trying to figure out Turner and
his meaning for those who lived and died is an arduous task and that,
whether we like it or not, is what we are called to as Americans.

Dissolve to a swamp in SouthamptonCounty. The faint image of Nat Turner emerges
before we fade to black.